The first time I heard about the lo-fi underground scene’s flirtation with flotation–analogue-synth-bubblebath muzik from the Seventies and Eighties– was reading David Keenan’s episteme-delineating 2009 feature on Hypnagogic Pop for The Wire.

What struck me at the time was that there was a kind of cultural-economic logic behind this unlikely upshot, or more precisely, a cultural-financial logic, in so far as it was a form of speculation. See, if you’re a left-field hipstermusic type band, the formation of your artistic identity involves pulling together a portfolio of influences. Which leads to artists competing to find things to be into and be inspired by that nobody else has thought of yet. This revalorization game encourages musicians to look for hitherto ignored/deplored genres or artists from the past and to convince themselves–and others–that they are:

A/ actually good, it’s just nobody else (in hipsterland) noticed it yet.
B/ in actual fact, more far out than many acclaimed artists in the middlebrow zone
(or if neither A nor B can remotely be argued plausibly )
C/ so bad they’re far-out in their badness, and thus good.

So it was probably always on the cards that sooner or later New Age’s time would come. Indeed because musicians are frenziedly competing within the one remaining scarcity economy (the economy of attention), there is a lot of incentive to take a speculative leap so that you stand out in a pack of people touting more obvious and played-out influences.

That said–and as Andy Beta notes in his excellent LA Times piece–there’s another kind of logic to New Age’s uptake by cool-hunter bands. The dread zone of serenity-sounds indelibly associated with wind-chimes, crystals and affirmation-therapy tapes is bordered on every side by a genre that’s held in high esteem.

Like German kosmische rock: figures like Ashra Tempel’s Manuel Gottsching drifted close to the zone in their solo careers, while others like Deuter went on to make full-blown meditation music.

Like ambient: #3 in Eno’s Ambient Series was Day of Radiance by Laraaji, whose zither-chimes would grace a swarm of later releases with titles like I Am Healing and Chakra Balancing Music.

Not forgetting Takoma, the label started by longtime underground icon John Fahey, which unwittingly set the template for the placid-guitar-instrumental side of Windham Hill.

Another blurry boundary between New Age and critically respected music involves those genres of Nineties techno that targeted the chill-out room rather than the ravefloor: groups like The Orb, B12, and Biosphere, labels like T:me / Em:t and Fax (whose founder Pete Namlook was originally in the New Agey electronic outfit Romantic Warrior). In this Resonant Frequency column from 2002, Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson tracks the way that post-rave electronica veers over and again to the very brink of New Age.

And here’s an artist who goes as Panabrite and likewise explores the interzone between Steve Roach-style space music and Vapourspace.

Beta’s LAT piece covers most of the prime movers in nu-New Age, figures like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never. One favorite of my own that’s not mentioned is Dolphins Into The Future, a/k/a Belgian musician Lieven Martens, whose work I discuss in depth here

As the name suggests, Martens focuses on a specific sub-region of New Age culture to do with reverence for the cetacean nation: Roger Payne’s whale-song recordings, Joan Ocean’s books about communing with dolphins. He also takes inspiration from the related prog-rock/New Age sub-genre of environmental recordings and “Nature Sounds” tapes. Once again, this zone is only a notch away from avant-garde composers like Annea Lockwood (A Soundmap of the Hudson River, etc) and Pauline Oliveros (whose Deep Listening Band has made music in giant cisterns with 50 second echoes), as well as ex-industrial musician turned sound-recordist Chris Watson (formerly of Cabaret Voltaire). But because New Age’s environmental and bird-song tapes serve a functional purpose–calming the stressed city-dweller with a dose of ersatz pastoral tranquility–it is deemed too lowly to be Art.
Finally, two blogs that specialize in obscure cassette-only and “private press” New Age recordings ( titles like Sea of Bliss and Jeweled Space, artists like Upper Astral and Iasos) along with environmental tapes and aquatic-themed library music records.